Folding Forum

I've been folding for four months, about 100 machines (4 mil WU to date), and I see the total machines and teraflop count dropping. At one point there 237k users doing 44k TF. Now it's only 175k and 38k. Exodus? Miscount?

1) Summer ! hot weather might force people to avoid constant running PCs at their home to eventually reduce energy bill
2) An increasing number of alternative distributed computing projects.
3) Other reasons of course possible, too.

and any combination of the three points above

Possibly seasonal fluctuation. Some people pause folding during summer to avoid extra heat or strain on their air conditioning, for example. Also, FAH might have some corporate/institutional donors which fold for a set period of time or a specific goal.

One such example of corporate donation is HPCS. HP did a burn-in for their Cloud Service by folding. For a couple of months, they were one of the most productive folding teams, maybe even the most productive one.

1. Hot summer weather, even I have had to shut one machine down which never normally happens
2. Continuing fallout from the BA changes
3. Current corporate folding coming to an end
4. Uni students back at home for the summer and no longer having free electricity/access to their machines

The number is roughly where it has been for the last 6-9 months once you strip out those factors.

It used to take several PCs to make 100K PPD. Now you can do it with one GPU. The stats numbers are ways changing. Without knowing if Google just started or just ended a large contribution to fah, there no easy or accurate way to discern why those changes happen. Seasonal, Social, Economic? Good luck with that guess.

PS there was a large corp donor that ended a project. See the blog.